I also cannot access the study on SciHub, but one should keep eyebrows raised with alarmist reporting like this. Palmitic acid is in everything. Ask questions like:
1. What's the strength of effect? Is it 50x more likely to see metastasis? 15%?
2. Is the diet a realistic diet? Are the mice or rats eating a significant amount more of palmitic acid than what would be reasonable in a human participant?
3. How does the mouse model differ from humans?
4. What are the systemic effects? People don't eat fatty acids alone, they eat them as (ideally) part of a diet composed of whole foods. Might the effect hold in a realistic diet with more palmitic acid?
... and so on and so forth. Without access to the actual article and some folks' willingness to critically look at methodology, this kind of writing just encourages people to draw simplistic conclusions about incredibly complex systems.
Should have no effect on our judgement regarding its safety. Probably the story of our times seen from the future will be how we failed to account for extremely widespread use of very minorly dangerous products. See stuff like microplastics which took a couple decades to go from research to ban. Take the famous example from Fight Club:
>The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. ... If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Except we've moved even one degree from that now, think of a variable Y which is the cost to even figure out what B is. If you're a company selling a dangerous product you don't just have to consider X, you can also factor in Y as a proxy for long/hard entities will have to fight just to figure out the harm you're doing. So we should think about both sides of the coin, that the research is good enough to show there is an effect but also that we're not increasing Y to completely unreasonable amounts.
It's not everything like microplastics. It's everything like everything. Palmitic acid is one of the most common fatty acids. Cocoa butter is 25% PA. Cow milk is 30% PA. Chicken is 20% PA. In human milk, 25% of its fat content is PA. Olive oil has tons of it too, so do soy oil and sunflower oil (and probably any vegetable oil you've eaten). But if you don't eat anything at all, human body is still about 2% PA - as I said, it's a very common chemical compound.
To quote Wikipedia:
Palmitic acid, or hexadecanoic acid in IUPAC nomenclature, is the most common saturated fatty acid found in animals.
If it were dangerous for animals, there would be no animals left living. It's not like microplastics that are exogenous. It's part of what living organisms are made of.
Instead, what happened is probably some kind of p-hacking - they gave this compound, lots of it to be sure, to lots of poor mice to which they gave cancer previously, and in some of them the cancer got worse, because it's cancer. So they wrote down which cancers those mice had, and declared that they linked the compound to "spread of cancer in mice". Easy peasy.
It mostly reminds me of this old Vox article[1], which was nicely summarized in the caption of its second graph: "Everything we eat both causes and prevents cancer".
In 99% of the news headlines you hear about the underlying study does not contain causal evidence in humans. It is almost always correlational in humans or a mouse model. So yes.
Generally weak evidence that can conform to some existing view an organization holds is cherry-picked into the news. Although sometimes it is just in the news because it is odd/interesting.
You are acting like anyone cares about effect sizes. As civilization, we transcended past such nuances, you can write alarmistic abstract about 3% effect size, as long magic p < 0.05.
> 2. Is the diet a realistic diet? Are the mice or rats eating a significant amount more of palmitic acid than what would be reasonable in a human participant?
I'll have to go digging for it, but I want to comment on something this reminds me of.
Someone a few months ago linked me to a study that showed that MCT oil caused weight gain in mice (might have been rats?), despite how MCT oil is known to be much less fattening than other fats based on how it's metabolized. If eaten in great enough abundance it may even cause weight loss.
Having learned my lesson from just relying on the abstract, I found the full text for the study using Sci-Hub; the diet fed to both groups of mice was a high sucrose diet, the experimental group having more MCT oil than the other. The experimental group had less weight gain than the control group. I'm pretty sure that detail was entirely left out of the abstract.
My point is that this person was trying to persuade me that MCT can "still cause weight gain" even though the study they linked to contradicted their conclusion, including the conclusion of the study itself.
EDIT: I think it was this one, although I'm not sure this is of interest to anyone here, but whatever:
Honestly, when people read studies and jump to conclusions, I have to assume that most of the time they're just trying to appear clever and are counting on the fact that few people are willing to actually read the full study.
Worse yet, journalists have a terrible track record in my experience. I've lost count of how many referenced studies I looked up that either contradicted the journalist's conclusion or didn't have any mention of what they were even talking about.
> 4. What are the systemic effects? People don't eat fatty acids alone, they eat them as (ideally) part of a diet composed of whole foods. Might the effect hold in a realistic diet with more palmitic acid?
Also this. How the diet interacts with the Randle cycle can change how these nutrients are ultimately handled. Palm oil in the diet may have no appreciable negative effect until you start eating it along with sugar in the form of things like Oreos and Twinkies (or sucrose-laden mice chow).
Good context rules. However, what always concerns me about 1 and 2 is that in our environment there are toxins of all types. Yeah, a penny here, a dime there, a nickle here again. Those all add up.
And since there's no way to sort that out, each of those individual toxins gets a free pass for being an insignificant amount. Unfortunately, we can to be mindful of the sum of those toxins being greater than the individual parts.
So now what? Is it reasonable and safe to ignore that context? And if we have kids?
But “toxins” don’t all have the same effect on the same biology. You can’t just assume that they all contribute to the same disease. Some of them may cancel others out. Even the word “toxins” is so much abused in the popular medical press as to be not only useless but misleading.
Any report like this needs to be evaluated for various factors, but one of the most important is the degree of effect. Some studies have identified effects that are are so small you would need to consume gallons of the product a day to see any difference from not consuming.
The press is full of these scary sounding reports based on a study that found something that the report fails to explain has not been verified.
Any one study should not be the basis of your life decisions. This would need to be verified or debunked by other studies until a consensus gives us enough information to determine how to act if needed.
Nature is a world leading journal with a very rigorous review process. They publish less than a tenth of the (proper) submissions they get. So the science here is likely to have high quality.
As for the Guardian article, there are some pretty heavy direct quotes in there, in case you don't trust the journalist's assessment (I don't see any strong reason why you wouldn't).
At this point, it's well known that journals are broken. The whole replication crisis is a product of journals like Nature and NEJM.
Their authority has always been a sham, and will continue to be, because "Science" is not about gatekeeping. These journals are rent seeking, avaricious entities profiting by selling the illusion of quality and exclusivity to universities and research institutions that should know better.
Science is not about publish or perish. It's not about making the most money from patents and royalties and residuals. It is process which research papers contribute to, but those papers are just like any other arbitrary metric imposed on groups of people - when the metric becomes the goal, the output will be exploited and gamified. The people playing by the rules will lose when everyone else is cheating, and the cheating among science journals has been going on for more than 3 decades.
Trusting any paper is a naive thing to do, but trusting a paper because of the supposed reputation of the journal is just silly.
Trust collections of research that uses reproducible experimentation and rigorous scientific methodology that reinforces ideas over a broad spectrum of literature. These journals are a toxic influence and the sooner they die off the better.
It's not a "supposed reputation" though. Nature is listed as a world-leading journal (class 2) by the internationally widely acknowledged research register "Norwegian Register". The double blind reviews aren't performed by Nature, but by peer scientists. And it isn't gate-keeping. You have every opportunity to publish your stuff in another journal or simply on the internet if you want to. A lot of scientists do the latter before trying to get it into prominent journal. Even in the case of a rejection, the feed-back you get from reviewers is often of very high quality, as in really helping you make your article better, as most journals give the review jobs to experienced scientists in your field.
In other words, a world leading journal generally contributes greatly to what you say in your last paragraph.
That said, I agree with most of your statements in the third paragraph (publish and perish etc.). It's not like I'm claiming that the current system is fine without side-effects, fake-journals etc.. I just don't think there is cause for the kind of suspicions voiced in the thread, in relation to Nature or the OP article.
This is maybe one of the mechanistic cause of cancer progression, but let's take a step back and see what would cause an excess PA concentration in our bodies [1], that is, other than force feeding mice with an enormous amount of dietary PA.
>>> in presence of other factors such as positive energy balance, excessive intake of carbohydrates (in particular mono and disaccharides), and a sedentary lifestyle, the mechanisms to maintain a steady state of PA concentration may be disrupted leading to an over accumulation of tissue PA ...
This kind of smells of bad science reporting, the paper itself does not seem to be bad science, but I haven't read the paper yet (DOI
10.1038/s41586-021-04075-0); a quote from the abstract basically, indicates they were force-fed unrealistically high palmitic acid content combined with the standard lab mouse fake feed diet. It also indicates the palmitic acid did not cause the cancer, but only increased its growth.
"Here we show that dietary palmitic acid (PA), but not oleic acid or linoleic acid, promotes metastasis in oral carcinomas and melanoma in mice. Tumours from mice that were fed a short-term palm-oil-rich diet (PA), or tumour cells that were briefly exposed to PA in vitro, remained highly metastatic even after being serially transplanted (without further exposure to high levels of PA)."
Mammals produce palmitic acid as the primary fatty acid during de novo lipogenesis (humans are estimated to have about 1/3rd of their body fat stored as palmitic, possibly more in strict vegetarians than everyone else), and palmitic acid is required for building the membranes of cells and subcellular structures (palmitoylation, a process that is used in the production of several thousand chemicals in the body).
Fundamentally, if they would have not had this outcome, then it would indicate we don't understand something fundamental about biochemistry. If you put fuel on a fire, the fire will grow. If you feed a cancer the ingredients it requires, then it will grow. Cancer does not really do anything special that any other cell doesn't already do (the form of "high copper" anaerobic metabolism it uses not withstanding); palmitic acids, and saturated fatty acids in general, are required for cellular growth, hormone construction, energy production, and an otherwise endless list of functions required for life.
The paper isn't saying "don't eat palmitic acid rich diets", which the science news seems to be trying to imply the paper says, and if it had said so, would be bad science in of itself; what it's saying is we should look into short term low palmitic acid diets as an adjunct therapy for cancer treatment.
That said, if you're looking into keeping cancer from starting in the first place, the semi-traditional human diet of one meal a day, sometimes with intermittent fasting thrown on top, seems to make sure cancer is kept at bay with our normal apoptosis cycle; apoptosis in humans only can re-engage after the postprandial insulin spike after 12 to 24 hours, depending on the individual. Saturated fats, including palmitic acid, are required to keep an individual functioning without being hungry all day long, but also to replace damaged cells garbage collected by apoptosis and also drive apoptosis itself.
What I find pretty interesting is that this stuff is in most of those 'natural' foods that aren't considered healthy. And it's already listed as a potential heart health hazard. Now add this cancer evidence on top of it and it really doesn't look too good for this stuff. But I guess more research is necessary.
Pretty much every oil except olive oil is supposed to be bad for you. Looks like we’re getting to a point where we have to reevaluate all of our traditional foods, even those that have been around for millennia.
Palm oil also has major deforestation implications. Congress recently introduced a bill to target the trade of palm oil called the Forest Act of 2021 (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-congress-democrats-targe...), which has a low chance of passing but is worth attention. I wonder if there is cancer attributable to the environmental impacts of large scale palm oil harvesting, apart from the alleged issues with the fatty acid here.
Readit News
I also cannot access the study on SciHub, but one should keep eyebrows raised with alarmist reporting like this. Palmitic acid is in everything. Ask questions like:
1. What's the strength of effect? Is it 50x more likely to see metastasis? 15%?
2. Is the diet a realistic diet? Are the mice or rats eating a significant amount more of palmitic acid than what would be reasonable in a human participant?
3. How does the mouse model differ from humans?
4. What are the systemic effects? People don't eat fatty acids alone, they eat them as (ideally) part of a diet composed of whole foods. Might the effect hold in a realistic diet with more palmitic acid?
... and so on and so forth. Without access to the actual article and some folks' willingness to critically look at methodology, this kind of writing just encourages people to draw simplistic conclusions about incredibly complex systems.
>Palmitic acid is in everything.
Should have no effect on our judgement regarding its safety. Probably the story of our times seen from the future will be how we failed to account for extremely widespread use of very minorly dangerous products. See stuff like microplastics which took a couple decades to go from research to ban. Take the famous example from Fight Club:
>The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. ... If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Except we've moved even one degree from that now, think of a variable Y which is the cost to even figure out what B is. If you're a company selling a dangerous product you don't just have to consider X, you can also factor in Y as a proxy for long/hard entities will have to fight just to figure out the harm you're doing. So we should think about both sides of the coin, that the research is good enough to show there is an effect but also that we're not increasing Y to completely unreasonable amounts.
To quote Wikipedia:
Palmitic acid, or hexadecanoic acid in IUPAC nomenclature, is the most common saturated fatty acid found in animals.
If it were dangerous for animals, there would be no animals left living. It's not like microplastics that are exogenous. It's part of what living organisms are made of.
Instead, what happened is probably some kind of p-hacking - they gave this compound, lots of it to be sure, to lots of poor mice to which they gave cancer previously, and in some of them the cancer got worse, because it's cancer. So they wrote down which cancers those mice had, and declared that they linked the compound to "spread of cancer in mice". Easy peasy.
Sources: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095232781...https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/240227/1/fatty-acids-c...https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5682332/
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8264355/research-study-hype
Is it just shorthand for some relationship that's truly significant and meaningful in the context of the article?
Or is it a weasel-phrase to click-bait people into reading a less significant finding and/or to impute guilt by association?
Generally weak evidence that can conform to some existing view an organization holds is cherry-picked into the news. Although sometimes it is just in the news because it is odd/interesting.
You are acting like anyone cares about effect sizes. As civilization, we transcended past such nuances, you can write alarmistic abstract about 3% effect size, as long magic p < 0.05.
I'll have to go digging for it, but I want to comment on something this reminds me of.
Someone a few months ago linked me to a study that showed that MCT oil caused weight gain in mice (might have been rats?), despite how MCT oil is known to be much less fattening than other fats based on how it's metabolized. If eaten in great enough abundance it may even cause weight loss.
Having learned my lesson from just relying on the abstract, I found the full text for the study using Sci-Hub; the diet fed to both groups of mice was a high sucrose diet, the experimental group having more MCT oil than the other. The experimental group had less weight gain than the control group. I'm pretty sure that detail was entirely left out of the abstract.
My point is that this person was trying to persuade me that MCT can "still cause weight gain" even though the study they linked to contradicted their conclusion, including the conclusion of the study itself.
EDIT: I think it was this one, although I'm not sure this is of interest to anyone here, but whatever:
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.002...
Honestly, when people read studies and jump to conclusions, I have to assume that most of the time they're just trying to appear clever and are counting on the fact that few people are willing to actually read the full study.
Worse yet, journalists have a terrible track record in my experience. I've lost count of how many referenced studies I looked up that either contradicted the journalist's conclusion or didn't have any mention of what they were even talking about.
> 4. What are the systemic effects? People don't eat fatty acids alone, they eat them as (ideally) part of a diet composed of whole foods. Might the effect hold in a realistic diet with more palmitic acid?
Also this. How the diet interacts with the Randle cycle can change how these nutrients are ultimately handled. Palm oil in the diet may have no appreciable negative effect until you start eating it along with sugar in the form of things like Oreos and Twinkies (or sucrose-laden mice chow).
:facepalm
Maybe that is an internal proxy/cache address? Possibly for getting around the paywall?
Or maybe they paid/arranged for an internally proxied SAML connection?
And since there's no way to sort that out, each of those individual toxins gets a free pass for being an insignificant amount. Unfortunately, we can to be mindful of the sum of those toxins being greater than the individual parts.
So now what? Is it reasonable and safe to ignore that context? And if we have kids?
Any report like this needs to be evaluated for various factors, but one of the most important is the degree of effect. Some studies have identified effects that are are so small you would need to consume gallons of the product a day to see any difference from not consuming.
The press is full of these scary sounding reports based on a study that found something that the report fails to explain has not been verified.
Any one study should not be the basis of your life decisions. This would need to be verified or debunked by other studies until a consensus gives us enough information to determine how to act if needed.
As for the Guardian article, there are some pretty heavy direct quotes in there, in case you don't trust the journalist's assessment (I don't see any strong reason why you wouldn't).
Their authority has always been a sham, and will continue to be, because "Science" is not about gatekeeping. These journals are rent seeking, avaricious entities profiting by selling the illusion of quality and exclusivity to universities and research institutions that should know better.
Science is not about publish or perish. It's not about making the most money from patents and royalties and residuals. It is process which research papers contribute to, but those papers are just like any other arbitrary metric imposed on groups of people - when the metric becomes the goal, the output will be exploited and gamified. The people playing by the rules will lose when everyone else is cheating, and the cheating among science journals has been going on for more than 3 decades.
Trusting any paper is a naive thing to do, but trusting a paper because of the supposed reputation of the journal is just silly.
Trust collections of research that uses reproducible experimentation and rigorous scientific methodology that reinforces ideas over a broad spectrum of literature. These journals are a toxic influence and the sooner they die off the better.
It's not a "supposed reputation" though. Nature is listed as a world-leading journal (class 2) by the internationally widely acknowledged research register "Norwegian Register". The double blind reviews aren't performed by Nature, but by peer scientists. And it isn't gate-keeping. You have every opportunity to publish your stuff in another journal or simply on the internet if you want to. A lot of scientists do the latter before trying to get it into prominent journal. Even in the case of a rejection, the feed-back you get from reviewers is often of very high quality, as in really helping you make your article better, as most journals give the review jobs to experienced scientists in your field.
In other words, a world leading journal generally contributes greatly to what you say in your last paragraph.
That said, I agree with most of your statements in the third paragraph (publish and perish etc.). It's not like I'm claiming that the current system is fine without side-effects, fake-journals etc.. I just don't think there is cause for the kind of suspicions voiced in the thread, in relation to Nature or the OP article.
>>> in presence of other factors such as positive energy balance, excessive intake of carbohydrates (in particular mono and disaccharides), and a sedentary lifestyle, the mechanisms to maintain a steady state of PA concentration may be disrupted leading to an over accumulation of tissue PA ...
Business as usual.
[1] Palmitic Acid: Physiological Role, Metabolism and Nutritional Implications (https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2017.00902)
"Here we show that dietary palmitic acid (PA), but not oleic acid or linoleic acid, promotes metastasis in oral carcinomas and melanoma in mice. Tumours from mice that were fed a short-term palm-oil-rich diet (PA), or tumour cells that were briefly exposed to PA in vitro, remained highly metastatic even after being serially transplanted (without further exposure to high levels of PA)."
Mammals produce palmitic acid as the primary fatty acid during de novo lipogenesis (humans are estimated to have about 1/3rd of their body fat stored as palmitic, possibly more in strict vegetarians than everyone else), and palmitic acid is required for building the membranes of cells and subcellular structures (palmitoylation, a process that is used in the production of several thousand chemicals in the body).
Fundamentally, if they would have not had this outcome, then it would indicate we don't understand something fundamental about biochemistry. If you put fuel on a fire, the fire will grow. If you feed a cancer the ingredients it requires, then it will grow. Cancer does not really do anything special that any other cell doesn't already do (the form of "high copper" anaerobic metabolism it uses not withstanding); palmitic acids, and saturated fatty acids in general, are required for cellular growth, hormone construction, energy production, and an otherwise endless list of functions required for life.
The paper isn't saying "don't eat palmitic acid rich diets", which the science news seems to be trying to imply the paper says, and if it had said so, would be bad science in of itself; what it's saying is we should look into short term low palmitic acid diets as an adjunct therapy for cancer treatment.
That said, if you're looking into keeping cancer from starting in the first place, the semi-traditional human diet of one meal a day, sometimes with intermittent fasting thrown on top, seems to make sure cancer is kept at bay with our normal apoptosis cycle; apoptosis in humans only can re-engage after the postprandial insulin spike after 12 to 24 hours, depending on the individual. Saturated fats, including palmitic acid, are required to keep an individual functioning without being hungry all day long, but also to replace damaged cells garbage collected by apoptosis and also drive apoptosis itself.
Presumably you mean "processed food".
It isn't in any natural food in America or the rest of the world unless the chef adds it in.
Dead Comment